


Landfall

by scioscribe



Category: Original Work
Genre: Existential Horror, Extra Trick, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2018-12-31 16:34:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,069
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12136563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: The only way to kill time in hyperspace is to tell stories, and Ayush has a good one.





	Landfall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Prinzenhasserin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prinzenhasserin/gifts).



> Happy Halloween!

Leah told him:

She had grown up on a space station: a coolly white cylinder of smooth walls and few shadows. For nine out of every twenty-four hours, the ambient lights on one half of the station dimmed and the white noise generators in the common areas incorporated the sound of crickets. Leah had never seen a cricket, and her grandmother made the mistake of telling her what they were: jumpers, with translucent brown armor, long feelers, and powerful hind legs that propelled them up and out in a blink of the eye.

Leah convinced herself they were waiting under in the darkness under her bed and in the corners of her room every night when the lights went down. They were poised to jump.

“But,” she said, with the air of someone wrapping up a long and tangled narrative, “I got over it.”

“That’s not a story,” Ayush said.

“Sure it’s a story.”

“It’s not an ending.” He laced his hands together behind his head and leaned back in his chair, staring out at the meaningless silver blur of hyperspace. _Perimedes_ was old but faithful—she tore slowly through the folded tissue-paper of the stars, but she always emerged whole, with none of the flash-burns or rubbery, weedy growths that other, more glamorous ships found on their hulls after jumps. The stability of _Perimedes_ was why he had contracted with Leah in the first place, despite the meager pay, despite the lack of prestige. He had lived through the bad jump of the _Californian_ and what he wanted most after that was safety.

And safety was what he had gotten—long, unending days of it, bland as bad congee. The work wasn’t interesting. The berths weren’t interesting. Leah wasn’t interesting. Ayush was starting to suspect that he wasn’t too interesting himself.

He couldn’t tell whether the sound he made was a sigh or a yawn.

“Here,” he said, desperate to entertain himself, “I’ll tell you a story and you’ll see how it’s done.”

“Astonish and delight me.”

“It’s not a delightful kind of story.” But he was starting to smile anyway—it did take him back to long weeks turfed with his cousins, all of them doing their best to scare the shit out of each other, the fifteen year-olds with an unfair advantage and no mercy on little eight year-olds like Ayush who were still scared of the dark, who still sometimes lit up his bedside panels at night. He had been the Cousin from Space, so of course they had made sure to tell him this particular tale again and again.

“You drift worse than our girl here,” Leah said, crooking her fingers around a screw in _Perimedes_ ’s console like she was scratching a dog behind the ears.

“I had to get used to filling out the hours somehow.”

“Fine.” She put her feet up. “When we dock next, I’ll buy updates for all our libraries. Maybe then I’ll learn how to tell a story, since clearly you’re never going to get started.”

He wanted to say that he didn’t know if new libraries would be enough—he wanted _color_ , he wanted _people_ —but like all lifetime flyers, he knew not to risk an argument too far away from landfall. He just nodded—always the safest tactic with a captain anyway—and began.

“Many years ago, in a time when memory was young, there was a ship that looked like any other ship, except for a long silver scar on her belly. Just a hyperspace burn, everyone said. All her diagnostics came back clear. What a lucky ship, everyone said. We should be so lucky, to travel on such a ship, and the captain saw the potential for money, so he gobbled it up. He made the ship into a long-distance pleasure-craft, perfect for families on holiday. And at first nothing went wrong.”

He looked at the smudge of stars, missing the distinctiveness of each of them on their own, the pinprick patterns of constellations. Never mind. They would make landfall in a few hours. What he needed to do was get some sleep. He’d taken a caffeine pill earlier to keep himself alert—the hazard of a two-person crew, besides boredom, was how little they could both sleep—but all he was left with now was a strange combination of dreaminess and jitteriness. Leah’s eyes were still bright—she seemed untouchable—she could make sure the rest of the trip passed smoothly. Once he finished the story.

His palms were sweating. He needed to find better ways of kicking himself awake.

“At first nothing went wrong,” he said again. “But then one night a little boy went missing.”

“Day,” Leah said.

“What?”

“There’s no night in space.”

He wondered if the whole night would just be the two of them disagreeing with each other. “There’s no day either.”

Leah said, “It’s a matter of perspective. A glass half-full kind of thing.”

She, he realized, had called the final hours of a cycle night in _her_ story—her formless flop of a story. When they landed, he was going to get so very, very drunk, and then he was going to sleep for ten hours, and then he was going to find a different job, one that didn’t require him to like one person for twenty-four out of twenty-four hours.

“A little boy went missing. His whole family looked for him all over the ship. They even lifted up the cushions on the window-seats, like he might have slipped between them. They looked in the pantry, in case he had tried to sneak sweets and gotten locked inside. They interviewed everyone and then they interviewed them again. But everyone was perfectly convincing: no, they knew nothing. Yes, they remembered seeing the boy, but that was much earlier in the trip. No, they had no idea where he might have gone to. Had they checked--? But wherever they mentioned had always already been looked into. All the luggage was searched. The boy was gone.”

“And that’s the end?”

“No, that’s only where my cousins would stop at first, before telling me the rest was too awful. Then one of them would find me later, in the dark, and tell me the rest. Little by little, all the people who had been on that last trip disappeared, like whatever had eaten the boy was less hungry now and could afford to go through the rest of them bite by bite. It didn’t matter that they had made landfall. And when I say they disappeared little by little, I don’t mean that they disappeared one by one, I mean _little by little_. They would forget the names of their children. They would go to brush their teeth at night and just stand there looking at themselves in the mirror. They would tell stories—they would tell stories that led nowhere. They would forget the punchlines to jokes. But it wasn’t like they were just getting old, it was like… like they were forgetting how to be human. They would smile all the time. They didn’t eat, and their bellies grew slack. They didn’t sleep, and they moved stiffly. So little by little they were gone: like all the juice had been sucked out of them. They were all found in their closets. Not that they had hanged themselves, but just sitting there on the floor, in the corner, dead. So people went back to the ship and they said, let’s go in, and we’ll find the boy in the closet, let’s bring his body out. But no one would. They said, we searched all the closets already, we searched under all the beds, there was nothing, there’s no point. But in their hearts they all knew that one of the closets on that ship had the boy in it. He’s still waiting in the closet, propped up in the corner like an unwanted doll, his eyes like dead stars—gone but still burning.

“And then, of course, they would helpfully point out that it had been months since anyone had looked into the closet of the room I was using.”

He waited for her to laugh, but it didn’t surprise him that she didn’t—she had never seemed to have much of a sense of humor.

“See,” he said, turning to her, forcing friendliness because he _did_ like her, she _was_ nice even if she wasn’t the kind of person he could just be stuck with, “ _that’s_ how you end—”

Leah was gone.

He was wrong, she did have a sense of humor after all. A very juvenile one. Even his cousins had depended more upon suggestion.

“That’s hilarious,” Ayush said. “Innovative. Really inspiring.”

But still there was nothing.

They weren’t supposed to leave the console unattended, that was what made the joke especially poor. He could go look for her and wait for her to jump out at him—that was probably the level of cheap horror they were working at—but only by abandoning the front of the ship. _Her_ ship. Of course, the risk was low, especially on an old campaigner as reliable as _Perimedes_ , but—

At least if he left, she would probably resurface quickly. She usually had a limited tolerance for breaking protocol. And he didn’t want to just sit there calling out to her over and over again, listening to his own voice bounce off the walls.

He didn’t want to concede even to himself that he was thinking it, but as he stood, he was grateful that _Perimedes_ had no stable-cycle settings. Their bunk lights clicked on and off and everything else stayed continuously on, bright and endless night following bright and endless day. Only there was no day, wasn’t that what Leah had said? _There is no day in space_.

Ayush left the cockpit.

 _Perimedes_ was a small ship that got cargo only because of her reputation for always making it through unscathed: she provided safe transport for gemstones, coffee beans, cobalt, and whatever else people were desperate enough for that they would pay through the nose for even an ounce of it. It was enough for two to make a living, but only barely. So there was not much room. A cockpit, a washroom, two berths, a common area, and a hold with only a few barrels in it.

Against all his better judgment, he said, “Leah?” once he reached the hold. Nowhere.

He made himself go to her room. Somehow, he found it easier to get on his knees beside her bed and look underneath the surprisingly frilly bedskirt, where he found only dust and a spare pair of running shoes. Then the closet. Which was ridiculous—the two berths were identical. Ayush had seen the closet. There would barely have been enough room for one person to stand inside it and close the door. There was no possibility of sitting, let alone sitting in a corner. It was as tight as a coffin.

Slowly, he slid the door aside, his fingers slipping on the latch.

Nothing but clothes. He even patted them, as if there could ever be room for anyone to fit behind them, and his hands easily touched the back wall.

He wanted to laugh out of relief, but his throat was locked tight against making any sound. He just stood there looking into the closet full of clothes until the pressure inside him eased.

“I need sleep,” he said. “I just need sleep. I can’t stay awake like this. I can’t just—stay awake and awake, with nothing to do.”

He would sleep and everything that seemed so strange now would make sense in the morning, and he consoled himself with that thought until he made it to his room, with its identical closet with its identical shut door. There would be no morning, he remembered that now. There was no morning in space and so there would be no waking up. In hyperspace especially. Why even try for landfall when the empty white of this place was always here?

He stood looking at the door, knowing what was behind it. He could hear it: someone separated from him only by this thin, flimsy pane, someone making a noise with their mouth. Not talking, only making sounds. Someone who had forgotten how to speak.

It sounded like crickets. Ayush began to open the door.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Landfall](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16421027) by [frecklebombfic (frecklebomb)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/frecklebomb/pseuds/frecklebombfic), [Vidriana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vidriana/pseuds/Vidriana)




End file.
